Written by Zhou Zhou, Foresight News
Chiang Mai is a large international village where Vitalik has recently lived for about 42 days. For him, who flies 55 times a year on average and "moves" almost every week, it is rare for him to live in a city for such a long time.
During these 42 days, a bottom-up, decentralized, and increasingly populous social life experiment took place. Eventually, more than 1,000 blockchain practitioners from all over the world arrived in Chiang Mai and spontaneously formed 8 or 9 cities and villages (Pop-Up City). They were going to build a "Web3 City" here for six weeks.
Vitalik said this is Zuzalu 2.0. Since he launched the first "flash city experiment" Zuzalu in Montenegro in 2023, he has been looking for ways to continue this social experiment. "Watching the development of Zuzalu 2.0, I feel like I'm watching how my son grows up step by step." Vitalik told me.
The crypto industry often has two distinct faces. Behind one face are various high-risk financial transactions and activities, and behind the other face are some idealists who continue to try to carry out some innovative practices based on the decentralized concept and incentive mechanism of blockchain.
"During these six weeks, there were a total of 1,422 participants and 1,663 activities, including meditation, hiking, Muay Thai, sound healing, Web3 technology lectures, and programming geek training camps... The largest village, Edge City, had nearly 500 people." Data from the Social Layer application shows. Here, builders use Social Layer to launch activities instead of the more standardized and commercial Luma. In addition to Edge City, there are some "villages", such as "Invisible Garden" with global ZK developers as the core and "Shanhaiwu" with Chinese Web3 practitioners as the core, both of which have more than 100 people. This allows experiments like Zuzalu to be passed down.
The great increase in the density and breadth of Web3 talents has made this a temporary "amusement park" for Vitalik's ideas. Vitalik visits two or three "Web3 villages" almost every day to communicate with the villagers. When he told me this, I found that he knew the location and characteristics of each village by heart, even down to the distance and direction of each village.
The frequent visits and conversations undoubtedly brought him many new ideas, and some new systematic thinking took shape in his mind. In this conversation, Vitalik talked about his ideas on Ethereum ecosystem applications at length. He pointed out that the technology has reached a certain level of maturity and it is time to start paying attention to applications. He shared several of the latest Web3 applications he learned in Chiang Mai. In addition, he also talked about his observations on encryption institutions such as Solana and Binance, as well as Tencent AI Labs, "The Three-Body Problem" and other Chinese elements, and finally shared his life, habits and hobbies.
To this end, Foresight News invited Vitalik to conduct an offline interview in a "village" in Chiang Mai - Shanhaiwu, and asked him to share his observations and thoughts during this period. The following is the text content.
42 days in Chiang Mai
Joe: Hello everyone, I am Zhou Zhou from Foresight News. I am very happy to invite Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, to do this interview. Vitalik, can you introduce yourself?
Vitalik: Hello everyone, I am Vitalik Buterin, a famous Dogecoin holder.
Joe: It's a very iconic introduction. You stayed in Chiang Mai for a long time this time, more than 30 days. What kind of people and things attracted you?
Vitalik: I travel a lot from place to place. I think I fly 55 times a year on average, not including transfers. However, in Chiang Mai, I didn't move for six weeks. I felt that this was a good opportunity to work and rest at the same time. Of course, I found that I had a lot of activities every day in Chiang Mai.
Last year in Montenegro, I did an experiment with Zuzalu, and everyone said it was a success as an experiment, but we didn't know what the next step would be. In the period between Token2049 in Singapore and Devcon in Bangkok (about 7 weeks), some people launched a pop-up event in Chiang Mai. At first there were only a few, and then more and more. It can be said that it eventually evolved into Zuzalu 2.0, which is supported by the same fund (the Zuzalu Fund). I am the initiator and founder of Zuzalu 1.0, and watching the development of Zuzalu 2.0 makes me feel like I am watching how my son grows up step by step.
There are really many interesting things and communities here. There are seven or eight relatively large Pop-Ups, each with its own unique characteristics. For example, in Shanhaiwu, there are many interesting activities taking place, including technical, non-technical, and various meditation activities.
Invisible Garden is 900 meters away from here. They focus on ZK and Ethereum-related things. 3 kilometers to the east is MegaZu. They are a project that studies Ethereum L2 technology and emphasizes developer culture. They are doing Bootcamp (high-intensity training and learning) for application development. One kilometer east of MegaZu is Web3 Village, a Vietnamese community with some interesting speeches and activities. One kilometer further east is Edge City, which is very large. They may have 300 people now and have different content every week. They had an event related to stablecoins last week, and one about Dapp this week.
Every time you go to a pop up, you will find that the people are different, the things they do are different, and the topics they discuss are different, so it is very interesting.
Joe: You participate in activities in Chiang Mai almost every day. During this process, what new changes have occurred in your understanding and knowledge of Crypto?
Vitalik: In Shanhaiwu, I found that people in the Ethereum community would discuss two issues. The first question is why they are interested in Ethereum; the second question is what are the challenges of Ethereum.
On the Internet, many people have said some strange ideas to me, such as Ethereum's values are useless and Crypto is a gambling market. But in the Ethereum community, there are some people, including many Chinese, who participate in Ethereum because we have some values and life ideals that we particularly value. We want to create an open world, a decentralized blockchain and platform, and we will create some sustainable applications that will be better for society. People in our community say this.
But we haven't done it for a long time. Why? Because before this year, our technology was not good enough. In 2021, there was only L1, no L2. The transaction fee of Ethereum's L1 may be $1, $5, or even more. Last year we had a lot of L2, but these L2 were not safe enough, and their wallets had a poor user experience.
We can see what changes this year. First, Optimism and Arbitrum in L2 have reached Stage 1. According to a framework I made two or three years ago, if you are not at Stage 1, you are a multi-signature wallet, and there is actually no secure connection with Ethereum. But Optimism or Arbitrum have achieved it. First, security has been improved, and second, transaction fees have been reduced a lot. In February this year, the average transaction fee on L2 was $0.4, and now it is sometimes $0.004.
There has been an interesting trend in the technology industry over the past two decades: people have come up with some interesting ideas very early on, but no one may have been able to realize them for many years. But suddenly, ten or twenty years later, when the technology becomes good enough, these things become reality.
I have been interested in the topic of prediction markets since 2014. I participated in Augur (a prediction market platform founded in 2014) in 2020, but there were not many users at that time and my own user experience was very poor. I wrote an article "Prediction Markets Tales from the Election" in early 2021, and I made $58,000, but I paid $1,000 in transaction fees. Now Polymarket is based on Polygon, which can be said to be almost free.
There have been prediction markets since 2014, and entrepreneurs have been trying to do prediction markets for ten years, but it was not until 2024 that Polymarket suddenly became popular. Why can these applications become a reality? I think two reasons are crucial, namely lower transaction fees and faster transaction confirmation.
Blockchain is not a single technology. It may require the development of various other technologies before applications can explode. If you are a developer and you want to develop a blockchain application, the first case is that users have to pay $5 per transaction, the second case is that users have to pay $0.5 per transaction, and the third case is $0.005. In the first case, the only application that is likely to succeed is a high-value, high-risk financial product.
Farcaster is another very interesting example. They use a hybrid on-chain and off-chain architecture. Their important information, such as account registration, is on-chain, and the information sent by users is off-chain. They have a very interesting decentralized off-chain storage method. Every time you register an account or you have important information, they have to issue a transaction, which requires a transaction fee. If a transaction is $5 or $15, then this application is completely impossible to succeed. But if the transaction fee is $0.001 or $0.05, it is possible.
So our industry has entered such a situation. Everyone likes to say that many idealistic blockchain practitioners want to do non-financial things, want to solve identity problems, want to do some decentralized governance, etc., but the only success is high-risk finance. Because if the transaction fee is $5, high-risk finance is the only thing you can do. If the transaction fee is reduced to $0.005, many things that were impossible before become possible.
So I think there has been a new trend change in many blockchain applications, and many things that were impossible before have now become possible.
Joe: In addition to Polymarket and Farcaster, which are applications you often mention, what other interesting applications did you see during your time in Chiang Mai?
Vitalik: I found that MegaZu is doing some very interesting applications.
In 2018, I saw a very interesting application that wanted to build a crypto event platform. Sometimes there are 200 people signing up for an event, but neither the organizer nor the registrants know whether 100, 50, or 20 people will eventually attend.
So the model they want to do is "trusted commitment". If they participate, the applicants have to send 0.01 or 0.02 ether. If they don't participate in the end, their ether will be gone. If they participate, they will get part of the ether provided by other people who didn't participate. This will ensure that most of the applicants will participate in the event.
I think the idea of this app is very interesting, it can help us solve some problems in our daily life. This app was made in 2018, but there was no more news after that. I guess it was because the blockchain transaction fees and user experience in 2018 were not good enough. Now, there are many developers in MegaZu who are working on this kind of application, which I think is interesting.
"Many Web3 applications are now possible"
Joe: What do you and the Ethereum Foundation think about the current situation in which the community believes there is too much infrastructure and not enough applications?
Vitalik: I have seen some people criticizing our community. They would say that Ethereum philosophers particularly like to talk about technology and do not like to talk about applications.
Why is this? In the beginning, we couldn't develop applications very well because our technology was not yet complete. Now our technology has reached a certain level, and we can now develop applications. So now we need a community that develops applications. Whether it is technology or application, we need both. This is also the advantage of the diversity of the Ethereum community.
I think the best way is not to tell L1 developers to develop applications. The best thing they can do is to care about L1 issues. What we need to do is to give new people more opportunities and more space in the community. The first point is to give them freedom, and the second point is to give them more support.
Joe: Will there be more specific measures?
Vitalik: The first is the support in the community. If some people are working on some important applications, they can talk about what they are doing in the community, this is the first.
Second, there are many people who are good at making something useful for users, but they are not so good at the connection and connection between blockchain technology and L1, L2 and wallets. We also need some organizations that are more connected with the team, such as community organizations, hackathons, etc.
Another point is that the foundation is going to expand a team recently, and the goal of expanding the team is to maintain more relationships with wallets, such as MetaMask, OKX, Rabby, etc. Because wallets have many direct connections with users.
Joe: What are the top three products you hope to build on Ethereum?
Vitalik: I have mentioned Polymarket and Farcaster many times in the past year, not only because I like these two examples, but because they both represent a very promising category. Polymarket can be classified as a combination of finance and new media. 20 years ago we had traditional media, and 10 years ago we had social media, but now many people do not believe in traditional media and social media.
Everyone is talking about wanting to make better Web3 social media, but simply adding a crypto payment function to existing products has always failed. How did social media succeed? When Twitter first came out, its goal was not to be the next Facebook, and when Douyin and Tiktok first came out, their goal was not to be the next Twitter. We need to invent a new category and track, rather than just making some changes to the existing categories and tracks, and we can do better.
I would put Polymarket in the category of media. If I want to know what is happening in the world, I have a habit of going to Polymarket. When the media reports that something is happening, I will go to Polymarket to see if it is important. Or I can go to Polymarket to see if anything important has happened recently. If you see a lot of bets on an event on Polymarket, you will be curious about what happened.
Image source: Polymarket (US$3.6 billion bet globally on 2024 US election)
It is interesting that three different media, traditional, social and Web3, exist at the same time. Polymarket has two ways to participate. The first way is that you have money and you want to participate in this market. The second way is that you don’t have money but you will see the results of the market. I think this combination of market and non-market must have many opportunities. I don’t know what these opportunities are yet, but I think there must be many such opportunities. This is the first.
Regarding Farcaster, I think social products need to have some crypto elements. The biggest problem for crypto entrepreneurs now is that they fall into two extremes. One is to only make some applications that can make money but have no long-term sustainability or meaning; the other is to only be users but have no money at all.
The first problem is that entrepreneurs don’t make money, and the second problem is that users are unwilling to participate unless they are idealists. A successful Web3 application will combine these two parts.
SocialFi also has a history outside of blockchain. For example, in 2012, there was a project called Diaspora that wanted to be a decentralized Facebook, but they failed in the end. Now there are some Bluesky, Threads, etc. that are facing two problems. The first problem is that they can't make money, so they don't have enough resources to do good things.
The second question is, if the user is not an idealist, what is his goal in moving from Twitter? If we find a way to combine these two, it will be perfect. But no one has been able to do it completely yet. How to combine idealism and making money is a very important thing.
Joe: Will you pay attention to applications in the Solana, TON and other ecosystems?
Vitalik: I sometimes chat with people from Solana about what they are interested in and what topics everyone is thinking about and paying attention to recently. Some people really want to turn Depin into the infrastructure of the Internet or the next generation.
There are also exchanges such as Binance, which have made a lot of progress in some developing countries. In 2021, we went to Argentina, and I found that many of them use Crypto, but I found that although many of them are Crypto users, they are not blockchain users.
One Christmas, I was walking outside and I approached a cafe and the owner recognized me immediately and showed me that he had a Binance account. I asked him if I could use Ethereum to buy their coffee and he said yes. The payment process took about 5 minutes and the transaction confirmation time was particularly long, but this problem has now been solved. The reason why I am concerned about this topic now is that we hope that some exchanges will be able to accept on-chain transactions on the Ethereum chain after 12 seconds.
Joe: Just now I said that many people are Crypto users, but not blockchain users. This may be because many behaviors on the chain now happen on the web, not on the mobile phone?
Vitalik: There are some wallets that are encouraged now. For example, Daimo on Base is a good example. Their goal is to make a decentralized wallet.
Ethereum’s “Crisis”
Joe: What do you think is the biggest crisis facing Ethereum right now? And what do you think has hindered the development of Web3 in the past two years?
Vitalik: I wonder if 2022 and 2023 will be the most dangerous time. I think we are better now.
In 2022, AI exploded, and many people began to think that AI was an opportunity for the future. Crypto was a relatively useless place that could only be used for gambling. Many people with ideals and a positive impact on the world left Crypto because, as I mentioned before, they were disappointed with Crypto because of some issues about transaction fees and technology. I remember when I went to Silicon Valley in April 2022, I chatted with some well-known AI practitioners, and they all told me that Crypto was useless. This happened before the FTX bankruptcy in 2022, and the situation became more serious after FTX.
Now Crypto has made a lot of successful progress in technology, and has also begun to have more success in applications, so I think the current situation is better.
Now I think there is a risk that our community has become very diverse. Some people focus on finance, some focus on cyberpunk, and some focus on culture, art, philosophy, etc. They all have different ideas. A failure is that they start to disrespect each other. Some people only make money-making applications and do nothing else, and some want to do meaningful things but have no money. I hope these two can be combined.
Joe: Solana is becoming more and more powerful, and many people believe that it has become the most important competitor of Ethereum. What do you think about this issue?
Vitalik: I think they are really more centralized than Ethereum.
First, running a Solana node is much more difficult than running an Ethereum node; second, Solana's PoS is more centralized; third, the community has more things that are directly supported by the Solana Foundation.
They pay much attention to applications and like to talk about Depin. The Depin they do is to cooperate with some large companies to sell some hardware and cooperate with communication companies to build a new Internet. These applications have one characteristic, which is that the demand for decentralization is much lower than that of Ethereum. I think some of the market goals they pursue are really different from those of Ethereum.
If you want the "highest performance" blockchain in the market, Ethereum's L1 will never meet your requirements. You only have two choices, the first is to go to other high-performance blockchains, the second is based on Ethereum L2, including Arbitrum, Base, MegaETH, etc.
So what does Ethereum do that other faster chains can't? I assure you that it is a long-term decentralized, neutral, and very secure blockchain. You can look at some data charts and compare the decentralization of Ethereum's PoS mining pool with Bitcoin's mining pool, and you will find that Ethereum is more decentralized than Bitcoin.
We have a successful experience and history in solving some of our centralization problems. One example is the client problem. Three years ago, the Ethereum network was using Geth and Prysm, but now no client accounts for more than 52%.
Another example, two years ago we had a crisis with Tornado Cash. Some people started to ban some crypto transactions, and everyone was worried that the Ethereum chain would become non-neutral. A year later, you can see the situation, what percentage of the blocks will block those transactions. You can find that two years ago it might be more than 80%, but now it has been more than 20%, 50%. One or two years later, you can see the results of our solution to these problems.
Ethereum L1 is not the best place for high-performance applications. If you want to make a game, L1 is not the best place either, so we need L2. This is the architecture of Ethereum. The architecture of Ethereum L1 is decentralized, neutral, and secure, and it should be the only one that can be compared with Bitcoin. L2 can focus on the efficiency and speed of transactions and provide a good blockchain for mainstream users.
Joe: Does this mean that the final form of Ethereum should be hidden behind all L2s invisibly?
Vitalik: That’s a little bit. The only surprise is that Ethereum as an asset cannot succeed if no one knows about it, so from this point of view Ethereum cannot completely become a background thing.
Ethereum needs to be known to everyone. Ethereum will not be like Google Cloud, which is completely invisible. Ethereum's advantage over Google Cloud is that it is invisible under normal circumstances, but it can be seen when it is most necessary. There is such a difference.
Therefore, before a particularly necessary situation occurs, we still have to talk about the existence of Ethereum's L1 and the advantages and characteristics of Ethereum's L1.
Joe: You just mentioned AI. How often do you use AI products? Do you often use products like ChatGPT?
Vitalik: Yes, I sometimes use ChatGPT. I bought a powerful GPU for my computer so I can run some local models. Some of the pictures in my articles were actually drawn by me using local AI.
Joe: What new things do you think will emerge from the current combination of AI and Ethereum?
Vitalik: I feel that AI and Crypto have had a relatively important connection in the past decade, that is, AI is involved in decentralized exchanges. This example is very interesting, and it represents a large and promising category.
What is this category? Crypto can use smart contracts to define the rules of the game, which can ensure that the execution of the game is safe and AI can participate in the game. What is this game? Decentralized exchanges are the first example, and prediction markets are the second example. There may be more examples in the future.
Joe: There are also voices outside saying that from a technical mechanism perspective, Ethereum is becoming more and more centralized. What do you think about this issue?
Vitalik: I find it strange that they say that, because I feel that Ethereum is becoming more and more decentralized. The problem we are facing now is some consequences of decentralization. I can give some examples, such as L1 client development. Five years ago, we only had one client, which was Geth, and now we have Geth, Nethemind, Besu, etc.
Now you can go to a website called ClientDiversity.org, you can see what percentage of the Ethereum network is using different clients, you will find that Geth has 52%, and the others are a little less. But no client is now more than 66%.
Now what will happen if Geth has a problem? First, the Ethereum network will not finalize, because finalization requires 66% of the nodes to agree. So there will be a fork, but this fork will not finalize. At this time, the client developers will study which client has a problem. When they find that the Geth client has a problem, other clients will not change, but Geth will.
This happened once in 2016, when Geth used 85% of the network at that time. After 12 hours, everything was back to normal. Now the network will not be finalized. If there are some applications with particularly high security requirements, they will immediately know that there may be a problem and have to wait and confirm. After 12 hours, the new version of Geth will come out without any problems. So the development of client decentralization is very good.
You can also look at the companies behind the client and see how their money comes from. In 2021, the clients are theoretically different companies, and their money is sponsored by the Ethereum Foundation. So it can be said that the degree of decentralization is not that strong in 2021. Why do we do this? Because we want companies with different clients to exist, and we want to give them a chance to grow. Now some client companies do not need the foundation's money, so we have given very little sponsorship recently.
Another one is related to the protocol. Five years ago, I was almost the only protocol researcher. Now we have a research team of at least 20 people, some of whom are from the Ethereum Foundation. We also have some other teams outside the foundation, some people from Paradigm, who will publish some of their own ideas about the protocol, and there are many more teams.
There are also organizations in the Ethereum ecosystem. Five years ago, the largest one in the Ethereum ecosystem was the Ethereum Foundation, the second was Consensys, and there was nothing else. Now we have some client companies I just mentioned, as well as independent organizations like ETH global, and various wallets, such as Metamask, Rainbow, Trust Wallet, Rabby, etc., while three years ago there was only Metamask.
One of the issues that everyone is particularly concerned about this year is the issue of interoperability. There are many different L2s and many different wallets, and there are some problems with their docking. If we are centralized, we will not have such problems.
So the problem we want to solve most now is how to maintain a decentralized ecosystem while still being able to coordinate in some important areas that need coordination and improve some important standards.
Joe: Just now you said that decentralization also brings some problems. I also found that everyone is discussing, for example, L2 is fighting alone, and Ethereum cannot form a joint force. What do you think of the view that various ecosystems seem to dilute Ethereum's resources?
Vitalik: I remember that in August, there were a lot of discussions like this, about different L2s and Ethereum activities, and there was a sense of competition. But I found that after everyone talked about these things, they were particularly willing to solve the problem of L2, wallets, and activities.
We had an L2 and wallet interoperability event in Chiang Mai the day before yesterday. There will be a bigger one at Devcon. They all agree that we need more standards and interoperability between L2s, and are willing to promote this link. I think some people outside, in order to fight Ethereum, will say that L2 is fighting each other, but if you listen to what the L2 people themselves say and think, you will find that they don’t want to fight, they want to cooperate.
Thirty is the beginning of life, but that’s all
Joe: Finally, let's talk about some more personal topics. Confucius said that a man should be established at the age of 30, and you are exactly 30 years old this year. 10 years ago, you wrote the Ethereum white paper. 10 years later, have you fulfilled your dream at that time? What will you do in the next ten years?
BUTA: It’s partially done, and I’ve found that my understanding of what we need to do has changed a lot.
A big change is my thinking. Ten years ago, I would focus on theory and use economics and mathematics to discover new mechanisms. But now the times are different. Most of the mechanisms we can invent have already been invented. Now we are not inventing completely new mechanisms, but optimizing what we have. The optimization process cannot rely on theory, but it can be done in some fields, such as cryptography and zero-knowledge proof. But in many fields, the only way is to do experiments. Do experiments to see where he succeeds and where he fails, and keep improving.
To give a specific example, 10 years ago I had an ideal idea to invent a governance model that can be mathematically proven to be optimal and correct. In many cases, you can use mathematics to prove that it is correct, but there are different participants outside the mechanism, and you cannot make a governance mechanism that is definitely stable.
There are some scientists in "The Three-Body Problem" who did a lot of experiments, but in the end they found that physics no longer existed, so they committed suicide. I feel that economics no longer exists. If we want to do more, our only way is to do experiments. If we want to optimize our public goods mechanism now, the only way we can do it is to do another experiment, change the mechanism, do another experiment, and change our mechanism again. I will probably do more of this now and in ten years.
Joe: What are your non-Crypto hobbies?
Vitalik: Walking, running, reading different books or different things on the Internet, going to different places and learning different languages.
Joe: What types of books do you like?
Vitalik: Most of them are non-fiction books, such as economics, history, or society. You will see some people on the Internet who write very long articles, which is actually equivalent to writing a book.
Joe: Where do you get your energy from and how do you prepare yourself in the morning to be in your best condition?
Vitalik: The most interesting thing about my life is that there are two kinds of jobs. The first kind of job is more introverted, such as writing code, writing articles, and talking about some topics with developers. The second kind of job is extroverted, which means participating in activities.
I found an interesting point between these two kinds of work. One is a break from the other. When you do one too much and need a break, you can do the other.
Joe: Who are your favorite writers, musicians, and philosophers?
Vitalik: This is a really hard question to answer because it’s really hard to say one is better than the other.
Joe: If you weren’t working in Crypto, what would you be doing?
Vitalik: Before entering Crypto, I was doing online education, so I think this is a relatively important topic.
My goal in the past two years is to combine Crypto with other important technical directions. If there is no Crypto, I might also do some Dapp things, including some medical and DCI (Data Center Interconnect) related. If I do something related to Crypto, I will make community notes.
Joe: Will you retire? Or disappear like Satoshi Nakamoto?
Vitalik: If I didn't do my current job, I would feel lonely.
Joe: What aspects of Chinese culture do you like most?
Vitalik: I have always felt that the Chinese community is very friendly. They have all kinds of interesting ideas. They also care about building a particularly good community and the values of Ethereum and blockchain. There are also some simpler points, such as Chinese food is delicious.
Joe: What Chinese food do you like?
Vitalik: Green vegetables and steamed fish.
Joe: Okay, this conversation is coming to an end. Thank you Vitalik for accepting the interview with Foresight News. I would also like to thank some Web3 practitioners in the Chinese community who followed this interview and provided some questions for this interview, including Mask Network co-founder Yisi, Social Layer co-founder Jiang, Foresight Ventures co-founder Forest, Conflux co-founder Yuanjie, Scroll co-founder Sandy, KOL Jason, etc. Their questions also partially represent the voice of the Chinese community. Of course, I would also like to thank Audrey of Shanhaiwu for her support and photographer Shaka. Thank you everyone.
BUTA: Okay, thank you.
